by Lee Thompson
Table of Contents
AFTER THE FOG CLEARS
Connect With Us
Other Books by Author
Monday
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Tuesday
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About the Author
About the Publisher
AFTER THE FOG CLEARS
Lee Thompson
First Edition
After the Fog Clears © 2016 by Lee Thompson
All Rights Reserved.
A DarkFuse Release
www.darkfuse.com
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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OTHER BOOKS BY AUTHOR
A Beautiful Madness
It's Only Death
The Dampness of Mourning
With Fury In Hand
Within This Garden Weeping
Check out the author’s official page at DarkFuse for a complete list:
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For John D. MacDonald (July 24th, 1916 – December 28th, 1986).
You inspire me in so many ways.
Rest easy…
I always owe so many people for their help and support and kindness. Thanks to my publisher and his team for their faith and all their hard work. Thanks to my gals Hannah and Rae, who continually inspire me. Thanks to my beta readers Shaun Ryan, Chris McCaffrey, and Charlene Cocrane for their sharp eyes. Thanks to all the book reviewers who have helped spread the word about my work. Thanks to all my friends for being awesome. Thanks to all my fans for sharing the love.
MONDAY
1
Eighteen-year-old Luther Anderson had the pedal buried on his old maroon jalopy. He raced the 1972 Impala down Webber Street on Saginaw’s east side. It felt like the world was blurring, but that could have just been the drugs in his system, the nervousness rampant in his heart. The houses here were clapboard shacks with sagging porches, hidden by deep fog and silent in the early morning stillness. Luther wasn’t aware of the child playing behind the shrubbery near the curb on the right-hand side of the road. His heart kept hammering and he kept blinking, gripping and releasing the steering wheel, the narrow tires on the big boat of a car jostling him as they descended into and rose from potholes.
School was out for spring break. It seemed safe to speed, nobody out, everybody sleeping in. He’d worked all night at Spencer’s Funeral Home on M-46 just west of I-75, a mile from the old Delphi plant where his and Herman’s dad and mom had worked until they’d gone to prison.
He wasn’t usually in such a rush, but his grandmother—a kind old woman who had, he believed, begun to lose her marbles—had called his cell and simply cried out in a voice so harrowing it raised the small hairs on his arms and sent a deep coldness shooting through the pit of his stomach.
Marie Anderson, the grandmother, meant the world to him. After his folks had been incarcerated, she’d done her best to look out for the boys—Luther and Herman; she made sure they were fed, properly taught, unafraid of working for a living. She’d instilled other values—to keep far from drugs and alcohol being one of them—and it was no small disappointment Luther felt within himself whenever he popped another pill his girlfriend Vikki had bought for him. But he needed the boost. That third-shift job was hard enough on a man, and then you add on caring for an old woman and a crippled older brother and no one could handle that kind of workload without some kind of stimulant.
So he was racing like hell toward her house, just past the high school where he’d gone and did not like then and liked even less now, when he saw the police lights growing in the rearview mirror, not more than fifty feet behind him and gaining fast.
Luther figured he was only three blocks from his grandmother’s house, and he wasn’t about to stop for anyone until he got there and made sure she was okay, and if not, he’d get her some medical attention. But he was a hopeful young man, and from experience he’d learned that the imagination was usually far more terrifying than reality.
And then there was a blur of movement, something he felt he should recognize from the side of the road, something that looked like the leg of a doll, and then a smeared dark face puncturing the fog above that leg near the edge of the road. It was confusing as hell, with his speed and his blood screaming and the worry he felt for his grandmother, to see eyes in that fog-shrouded face. Living eyes, curious eyes, some little kid’s eyes…
Luther jerked the steering wheel to the left to avoid the right side of the road and the innocence there, and the police car, building up to an incredible speed—an unsafe speed, Luther thought—swerved to the right to pull up alongside him, there for a second, crowding him, and then it disappeared.
The adrenaline he’d felt when he thought he saw some ghostly child bordering the road evaporated with the police car. It was the drugs, he told himself, it was maybe nothing more than that. It wouldn’t have been the first time fatigue and addiction had played some number on his head, when he thought he’d seen something that wasn’t there. He turned down the radio, just in case, and he listened those last couple blocks to his grandmother’s, but he didn’t hear anything out of the ordinary.
2
The Saginaw policeman chasing Luther was named Nathan Hazzard and he was forty-two years old, wide in the shoulders and slightly wider in the hips. He’d always had a weight problem, but his dark blue eyes were a weapon he used indiscriminately against all genders, all age groups, all races. It shocked people, as they looked from his wayward physique to his menacing, all-confident gaze. Two pieces that did not belong together. It made them uncomfortable. Normally he had to do little more than look at potential perps with a certain expression and they were peeing all over themselves to tell him their darkest secrets. He used silence, liked he believed he was doing now, not making a sound, just in high pursuit, riding up on that piece of shit and the fool who thought he could live by his own rules without crashing into the rules of someone with more authority.
But Nathan had to admit he liked the speed, and he liked the chase. Had since he was a boy, then a teenager, didn’t matter what he was pushing to its limits, just as long as he was able to stretch them and not die in the process. He had a knack for it, that was all, whereas others had a knack for administrative work, or washing dishes, or leading a country.
He could have
been a detective three times over, but he had three times that many disciplinary marks in his jacket. He did not see them as something to cry about; if anything, he felt he’d earned them. It was only a matter of time before the rest of the department caught up with his way of thinking. Officer Hazzard believed that in a world where civilians made their own laws, the law itself had to adapt and make its own unwritten ones as well.
He gripped the steering wheel tightly, his breathing shallow, controlled, and a bead of sweat tickling his forehead before it ran between his eyes and made him blink. Later, he would think it was the blink that had caused the accident, although others might have blamed the sweat for causing it.
He steered the car swiftly, efficiently, alongside the passenger rear-quarter panel of the beaten maroon Impala. You could look at the old beast and tell it was illegal; it hadn’t needed to try and elude a policeman to tell you that. He couldn’t see much of the driver, except to tell he was slight of build, had short dark hair, black skin. Probably making a delivery for one of the gangs in the area, or just so stoned out of his mind from the prior night he felt like cruising, outrunning fate and God.
They all made their own rules; it was something worth considering, and something he dwelled on quite a bit while on patrol. But he was their counterbalance, and he liked them in a way, because sometimes, secretly, he felt without the scum to wipe from his shoes, without the hookers to play, and the drug addicts to rustle, and the drug dealers to lend him a few bucks for his cooperation, he would have been without a purpose. And he’d seen what happened to men without purpose, all he had to do was think of his father and all of that damn family. They hated him of course because he was different, unlike them, had no desire to be like them.
The old car speeding through the fog never tapped the brakes. What a way to live, he thought, giving his cruiser a little more, thinking that he should call the chase in, but he didn’t know yet where it was headed. The runner pulls a gun and starts shooting at him, maybe then. But the situation had to escalate to a point that it merited sharing it with others. A man had to squeeze as much juice out as he could, while he could.
The bead of sweat slid into the tear duct of his right eye and he blinked and raised his right hand, obscuring his view on that side of the road in the process. He’d done that same motion thousands of times without ill effect. But the fog was dense—he’d always had a recurring nightmare of this same situation—and he felt his car hit something, solidly, and saw a blur of motion, what looked like a large black dog, pinwheeling over the windshield—and he had a moment to consider driving on.
A street-tough dog, a stray, was the least of his worries, if anything the world would be better off with fewer of them. But his eyes had locked on the rearview mirror, and he saw the small body—definitely not a dog, or any kind of animal—hit the narrow road and bounce up, and he blinked again and slammed his foot on the brake.
The sound of the tires sliding on the pavement was loud, yet not as loud as the sound of his fist hitting the dash. He parked against the curb. He’d shut the flashers off without realizing it. He sat there a moment, watching the mirror, expecting, or merely hoping, that the young kid would pick him- or herself up and dust off their clothes and walk from the road and disappear into the grayness of the morning.
A minute or two passed.
He heard a woman shout, her words indecipherable, and then she was there, in a pink robe, her hair cut short, her hands on the child’s shoulders, shaking him, her wild eyes roving the street.
When she saw his car, she picked the child up, and Officer Hazzard wanted to tell her that it was best to leave him as he’d been in case there was a chance for survival. She walked slowly toward him. He called in the accident, a minute later unable to remember what he’d told dispatch. But he could hear the other sirens in the distance, and hear, somewhere deep inside him, something cracking. It sounded like ice on Lake Huron in early spring, opening the world again to the depths that a long, nasty winter had sealed.
The mother’s eyes were all he could see in the mirror until she stepped farther into the street, her son—the policeman could see it was a boy now, in the side mirror—held loosely, his shirt torn along the left shoulder, exposing his raw skin, his body limp and bloody.
She was slim and maybe in her late twenties or early thirties; exotic-looking, like he imagined a woman from some Caribbean island might look. If he hadn’t been so shaken up, he knew he’d have been able to guess her age within a year. The kid was little more than a toddler, between two and three years old. Tears streaked the mother’s cheeks and the fog hung about her like a cape and a headdress.
He blinked again and wiped the sweat from his face. She glared at him through the driver’s-side window and he stared back until she beat her left fist against the window and opened her mouth and screamed something at him.
Officer Hazzard looked ahead, but she kept pounding on the glass hard enough to rattle his teeth, and out of the corner of his eye he could see the dead toddler’s leg flopping around.
A tan leg.
A bare foot.
Such small toes.
Listen to the squawk of a radio so you don’t have to hear the unrestrained volume of a torn-apart heart. Close your eyes so you can’t see a stricken mother outliving her little one; a woman who wishes she could follow him, to protect him, to never fail him again. Whisper to yourself, and to her, and to the thing she holds: Eventually the fog will burn away…
3
The boy’s father was named Raul Spencer. He was thirty-three and worked with his father, who owned Spencer’s Funeral Home. He’d watched the grieving go down day after day; they were never short of the dead, he thought. His mother was a florist and supplied the lilies, and the roses, and the carnations for the gravesides where the broken families—solemn and looking deeply into the past and the future, most of them forgetting for a second that there was a present moment at all—stood like headstones over a gash in the earth.
It was good for them to remember that present moment, Raul believed, although he could not say why.
There were only a few types who hovered over the graves, and only a few more types that put distance between themselves and the casket. Among those who hovered there were the weepers (open and unashamed), the stones (closed off and, at least on the surface, unfeeling), the supporters (who cast small smiles at the others, and who gently offered support to a grieving wife or mother’s elbow with a steady hand).
Those in the distance were the gawkers (who never felt much of anything, especially for the one being deposited); the whisperers (who had to say something, about anything, because it helped keep them level and from drawing too close to all the emotion or lack of emotion surrounding the casket); and there were the drinkers and smokers (farthest from the others, who knew better than everyone else their own mortality. And it hurt to see themselves in such a box with a small gathering there to send them off after too short a life).
Raul, having never lost anyone at all—his family was small; everyone marked by health—had a hard time imagining which type he might be: hoverer or distancer; and which subcategory he’d fall under. He was very close to all of his family. He feared he’d be a weeper, which would have surprised everybody—since his name’s essence meant strong. By day at work, and by night at home, he was a calm, collected individual. His father, Raymond Spencer, had instilled confidence and knowledge and skill in Raul from a young age. He liked to say that he’d groomed his son, but Raul had always hated that expression and refused it with a cold bluntness every time his father suggested Raul groom his own son, Dominic, in turn.
He was in the break room that morning, drinking black coffee, thinking about his father and his son, and how he was a link between them, shaped by both, and yet feeling he had little influence on either. For all his outside calm, Raul was always an anxious man (he’d also been an anxious boy, but he’d learned to hide it in pursuit of his father’s praise and to deter his father’s cond
emnation).
It did not matter to him, much, if his dad labeled Raul a good father. His three-year-old was his own business, and he would raise him how he saw fit. There had been many things to learn (Raul had no idea what being a father meant until he was neck deep in the endeavor, and his son went from one phase to the next in what felt like warp speed). Dominic was as emotional and strong-willed as his mother, whom Raul also thought of frequently. If nothing else, working for his father, in the quiet of this palace, he was offered time to consider and evaluate anything. When he’d been younger, the funeral home in all its elegance had still felt like a prison, the notorious limbo, where the dead went to wait alone in a dark room until they were placed in an even darker recess.
He heard his father’s footsteps and felt himself relax a bit. It was too easy, at times, to become too serious. His life was one other people wished for. A great family; a terrific job (and what would always have, he knew, no shortage of work); he had his health; his son Dominic, who never failed to impress him; he had a vacation every year, time spent at Houghton Lake, to unwind, and smile, and laugh, and soak up the sun with those he loved; he had nestled into every role that had at first felt uncomfortable. Being a husband had not been easy, the same with being a father, and working for his own dad. He came into the room where Raul sat, grinning to himself, for a moment overcome by gratefulness.
His father was almost a foot taller than Raul’s five-foot-six. Wider in the shoulders and hips, slightly portly, his thick black hair always freshly cut and styled as if he still moved through the 1950s. Very Leave it to Beaver. He could count the times on one hand when he’d seen his father wearing something other than a suit. It was a skin, of course, like some people protected their psyche with tattoos or the uniform of a soldier, or policeman or fireman. His father touched his shoulder as he walked behind him to get at the coffee. He never wore cologne, another oddity, Raul thought, but he greatly admired some things about the old man. He’d been, still was, a good man who had such intense reverence for the deceased, possibly more than he had for the living. He was well-respected in the community too, despite the border he walked between the mildly awake and forever asleep.
